


you were a wild thing

by arahir



Series: to go, to follow [2]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Accidentally Possessive Shiro (Voltron), Dads of Marmora (Voltron), Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Protective Keith (Voltron), keith: i've only had shiro for three days but if anything happened to h
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-14
Updated: 2018-06-08
Packaged: 2019-05-05 13:20:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 18,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14619408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arahir/pseuds/arahir
Summary: Keith brings home his champion and tries to fix what's broken in him. Or: Shiro meets the parents and has a bad time.The day Keith carries the Champion in from the rescue mission, Kolivan takes one look at them and says, “That?That’s what you went back for?“He stops cold at the look on Keith’s face because the thing in Keith’s arms is covered in its own blood and unmoving and Keith is a brutal fighter, but he’s never looked before like he does in that moment.





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i was coerced into posting this ahead of schedule so apologies. the title is from timecop1983's song [static](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCwR2k6rImQ) which i'm obsessed with.
> 
> i have no idea if you need to read the previous fic before this one for it to make sense because my brain is fried but probably wouldn't be a bad idea? maybe?
> 
> [[fic on tumblr](http://arahir.tumblr.com/post/173906920125/you-were-a-wild-thing-7k-1-of-2-hc-fluff)] [[fic on twitter](https://twitter.com/arahir/status/996159286811099137)]

After months of captivity, kindness is a stranger.

When he wakes up, it's to warmth, a soft bed, and breath against the back of his neck. There's the peripheral tightness of bandages across his face and back and thigh, but he barely registers it before the line of heat against his back shifts and identifies itself. Bare skin, muscle, the tickle of hair against his shoulder, an arm wrapped around his chest—his mind stutters to a halt while he tries to remember any scenario where this makes sense.

"Hey,” a voice mumbles against the back of his neck.

The rough sweetness of it is familiar. Everything slides into place, relief hitting him like a punch to the gut. Shiro doesn't realize he's made a sound until Keith is leaning over him, brushing his knuckles against Shiro's temple.

"Morning," Shiro rasps.

"We slept in." He's grinning, like sleeping in is some mythic concept, and to him, it might be. The Blades don't seem like they're much for rest and relaxation, but they've made an exception for Shiro and by extension Keith. Three days in, he's still trying to find his feet, but this is solid ground—Keith is solid ground, always.

He presses his lips to the edge of the bandage on Shiro’s cheek and then stands to dress. Shiro rolls to watch. His hair sticks up in the mornings and he drools in his sleep and as Shiro stares, he sees Keith make the conscious decision to dust off and pull on the uniform he tossed in the floor the night before. He is, in all ways, perfect.

“Hungry?” Keith asks, pulling on his gloves and his red jacket over the slick black suit all Blades seem to wear.

Shiro nods even though prying himself out of bed doesn't sound appealing. It's warm and there's still an ache in his back and leg from the fight he's been trying to forget, and a tightness in his jaw from something more pleasant, but the concept of food on demand is still new and attractive. There are moments where he forgets he can walk out the door of Keith’s room any time he wants to, go where he wants to, do what he wants to. It’s easier to let Keith lead him for now.

The Blades haven’t settled on what they want to do with him. It’s too bad _look what the cat dragged in_ isn’t an idiom the Galra know, because it’s exactly how he feels. Like something that’s been dragged, at distance, and left on the doorstep of a family who would just as soon not deal with him.

It’s exactly what he is.

 

* * *

 

The day Keith carries the Champion in from the rescue mission, Kolivan takes one look at them and says, “ _That?_ That’s what you went back for?“

He stops cold at the look on Keith’s face because the thing in Keith’s arms is covered in its own blood and unmoving and Keith is a brutal fighter, but he’s never looked before like he does in that moment. He’s either about to cry or snarl, and it’s so easy to forget that he’s as much Galra as Antok is.

Smaller, younger, no less ferocious—and he’s coming off a heat, bonded to _that_.

They give him space. Ulaz shows him how to clean a wound and wrap it. By rights, the thing should go in a healing pod, but they don’t have any to spare and even if they did, Keith would probably try to go in with him.

The Champion is a surprise in all the wrong ways.

He’s smaller than he should be, given what he’s taken on and defeated—and he's human. Painfully human. The white hair on his forehead and the robotic arm reek of quintessence meddling, but Ulaz claims he’s free of that particular taint. Kolivan watches it all in silence, reserving judgment, trying to ignore the dawning unease in the back of his mind, the nagging awareness of an enemy behind their lines.

The Champion ends up in Keith’s quarters because that isn’t a battle Kolivan was willing to fight.

Thace might have. He’s the one that brought Keith home, so tiny then they could let him sit in one hand or carry him around on a shoulder like a pet. He's still small—smaller than most half-blood Galra and smaller than the Champion by far, but he’s proven his worth a hundred times over. Still, Kolivan is reminded for the thousandth time, it’s the nature of those who have watched a thing grow to worry for it beyond logic.

It takes two days for the Champion to wake up. Too long, Kolivan thinks, and starts to worry what will happen if he doesn't wake—or worse, wakes as something broken. Keith doesn't leave his side once through it all. A heat lasts a week, the consequent bond maybe two, at most. Kolivan doesn't entertain the thought that it might be anything deeper.

It almost certainly is.

They know when he wakes because Keith misses a meal. Ulaz checks on him before the rest of them can start to worry and reports back, demeanor the same unaffected calm it always is. Optimists are hard to come by in a war fought so hard for so long; it's vexed Kolivan for years. Hope is what they operate on, but most know better than to say so out loud.

“You’re like a worried mother,” Ulaz tells him before he opens Keith's door, amused. It’s not usually Kolivan’s province to worry, even where Keith is concerned.

“I don’t like risks,” Kolivan corrects. There’s a difference and their survival hinges on it. That’s what the Champion is—risk, manifest. Their biggest yet.

As soon as the door slides open, he sees the mistake he’s made.

In the early days of the empire, they bled. Before they learned stealth and secrecy and the long game, before they knew what they were up against, Blades went down by the hundred. Now, the loss of one agent is profound and they’ve learned. Embed, gather information, do not draw attention. Knowledge or death is literal—they won’t defeat the empire this century, so stay low and stay smart. If you don’t, you die.

They haven’t had an agent captured in a more than a decade, because every agent who gets made gets out or finds a more profound and permanent solution. It's expected and unspoken, a rule they all abide in the end. Don't let yourself get captured. Under no circumstance can the Empire have a hold over them.

Every Blade knows it. Every blade—except Keith. He’s their exception, another unspoken agreement, universally abided. This one thing they’ve held back from him because the possibility of him in enemy hands was always unimaginable, but the thought of him dead by his own hand for the greater good was worse.

Weakness, too, the Blades disdain. Before Keith they had none.

Inside, Keith’s room is dark and quiet, lights still off. Keith is sitting up in bed, back to the door, and the only part of the Champion that's visible is a shock of white hair hanging over Keith's shoulder and his arms around Keith's naked back—one flesh, one metal.

The Champion’s breathing is too loud in the quiet and wet with what must be tears if it isn’t blood. Kolivan is used to hearing the latter more than the former. Keith is holding him so tight it’s as if he thinks the man in his arms going to fall to pieces if he lets go.

That's it, Kolivan realizes. Their weakness has a weakness.

If Keith is their blindspot then this man is Keith's, and it's a blind spot a mile wide. Being a Blade doesn’t leave room for a family, but everything is shifting and changing. Pieces are moving, and maybe this change, too, was inevitable. In the most distant sense, it’s funny. Their most precious asset captured by the Empire, and Haggar’s pet captured in turn. They almost couldn’t have planned it better.

Almost—but there’s no world where they would expose Keith to this danger. The thing resting in his arms is lethal.

Kolivan waits in silence for the man to gather himself. Keith already knows they're in the room and glances over one shoulder to eye him and Ulaz. It's not distrustful, but it's not welcoming either—and that’s new.

“We need to talk,” Kolivan says in a measured tone.

The man freezes at the sound; his sobs stop like his breath has been cut off. He raises his head from Keith's shoulder, but even red-eyed and bandaged, it’s a look that cuts. His arms tighten around Keith before he releases him, but he keeps one arm around his waist in a loose hold. The prosthetic looks wicked in the dark. It's massive compared to what it holds and part of Kolivan balks at anything so deadly near Keith.

After he was taken, after Ulaz found out what they’d done to Keith and where they’d thrown him, they pulled up the holovids of the Champion’s fights. He looked nothing like this sad, wounded thing. His eyes were steel and his arm was fire and he killed with prejudice. Even when the fight was pure sport, for the entertainment of seeing one thing cut something weaker and smaller to pieces, he fought hard. He’s a survivor. He’s a killer.

He’s an unknown.

There’s no way to trust this thing Keith’s brought them, no matter how much Keith may want to. No matter how much they may want to, for him.

Kolivan knows humans. You don’t throw them in an arena to watch them win. But this one did.

 

* * *

 

Shiro wakes in confusion and quiet. Keith is a rock to cling to in the seeping dark. It takes time to believe he’s real. In Shiro’s darkest mind, he wonders if it’s something he conjured in the cold of the cell, but the fingers digging into his back are solid and rough and the hair brushing his nose smells clean in a way he doesn’t know how to imagine.

It is Keith, and he's real, but the universe doesn't have time to wait for Shiro while he pulls himself back together through that realization.

Kolivan explains the situation. Zarkon and Haggar, the Empire and the Blades, and Earth's incidental, almost accidental place in it all, so minuscule in scope. They drive that reality into you at the Garrison. The Earth is small, even within their system. He's used to envisioning it; he's memorized diameters and distances, but this is something else. In short words, he puts their fight in perspective, and Shiro realizes at once that what he's been through is one year of ten thousand, on one ship of a million like it. He's irrelevant in the long stretch of time, but the Blades aren't, and Keith isn't.

Their fight is insurmountable. He knew. He knew, but seeing it on their faces is something different.

Keith stays close through it all, sitting in his loose, dark pants, cross-legged over the covers, one hand resting on Shiro’s thigh. Kolivan’s eyes dart to it twice during their conversation, but Keith doesn't twitch and he doesn't move and there's almost a defiant bent to it.

The conversation stops short of anything substantive. Kolivan doesn't trust him and he shouldn’t. It’s a wonder Keith does.

When he's gone and they're alone again, Shiro is left with the silence and Keith and a changed world. Keith grips his thigh tighter, ducking to meet his eyes. He hadn’t realized he was looking down. “Okay?” Keith asks.

No. Not quite. Not for a long time, and the thing they attached to his arm suddenly feels more alien than it did when he first woke up with it. He didn’t miss the way Kolivan stared at it—like Shiro was two separate entities, both equally dangerous, both equally unwanted.

“I will be.”

Keith takes it as permission to press an open kiss to his mouth, and another to the hinge of his jaw, and down to his neck. It should be overwhelming, but Shiro has the sense he could get addicted to it.

When Keith pulls away, Shiro keeps him close with a hand around his wrist. He feels like a child, clinging, but Keith takes his hand and tugs at him.

“Come on. I got you clothes,” he says, sounding pleased beyond reason by the prospect.

He helps Shiro dress. It’s not the same armor the Blades wear—it's softer, warmer, made for comfort. Shiro lets Keith maneuver him into it, one sleeve at a time. He doesn't need the help, but the gentle way Keith moves him is something new to marvel at. Keith stands back when he's done, picking at the cloth so it hangs right. “Sorry it’s big. Won't press on your wounds though.”

The shirt is oversize, but short, the hem rough-cut like someone did it just for him and misjudged the length. He hasn't missed the knife on Keith's belt.

“No, it's perfect.” The pants are the same cloth, low slung even with the drawstring. He's warm and comfortable and safe and Keith looks so concerned, as if any of this isn't everything to Shiro after a year in hell. “Thanks, Keith.”

Keith blushes all the way to breakfast. Shiro pretends he doesn’t notice the heat of it against his hand.

 

* * *

 

"We need to spar," Antok growls at Shiro from his spot against the wall. He’s been sizing him up since he walked in the room—it’s how he shows affection, Keith knows from experience, but there’s no way he’s getting within a hundred feet of Shiro with anything remotely sharp.

Kolivan frowns at him. “Not until we know what that arm can do,” he says in a tone of voice that actually means, _we have chairs, you could sit in one instead of looming over the table while the rest of us eat,_ but it shuts down Antok before Keith has to.

It’s a rare day that more Blades are on the base than off it, and something in Keith is on the edge of preening. Shiro is a solid presence beside him, smiling down at his food like it’s the best thing he’s ever seen. It’s not, it’s disgusting, but if it makes Shiro happy, it’s enough. Keith is making a mental list of the things he wants Shiro to have when he's healed enough to travel and food is an entire list of its own.

Before that, he wants everyone to see that Shiro is strong. He wants everyone to see that Shiro is his.

Antok scoffs. “That thing couldn’t hurt me if it tried.” It's not clear if he means Shiro or Shiro’s arm. Keith’s seen Shiro’s fights on holovid—it’s optimistic at best that anyone in the room could beat him. Even before the arm, Shiro was a force.

“We don’t know that,” Kolivan insists.

Ulaz wants to open it up and mess with the coding, but they don’t know how to do that without hurting more than helping. Thace is still embedded, trying to get more information. Kolivan thinks it’s all too risky but he can’t deny Keith this one thing—can’t deny him Shiro. It’s the first time Keith’s ever pressed his unspoken advantage with them. It’s the first time he’s had something precious worth trying for.

But none of that changes Shiro’s situation.

He’s staring down at the bowl of food now, expressionless, letting the argument flow around him. A few days rest put the color back in his face, but there’s still something wounded in his demeanor, and Keith doesn’t have any way of fixing it that doesn’t involve touch yet.

He settles for reaching across him and picking up the robotic hand where it’s curled on the table, threading their fingers together.  

Shiro flinches at the contact, but he doesn’t pull away. He glances at Keith under his bandages and pale bangs and his whole face goes soft. He looks better—better than he looked when they found him, at least, and it's fine if he's still a bit of a mess. If Shiro finds out the way Keith clung to his borrowed, ruined shirt for days after he got back, Keith will never live it down. He squeezes Shiro's hand. There’s something wounded in his demeanor always, an expression Keith doesn’t know how to get off his face except to smooth it away with his mouth and hands.

He has a waking vision of climbing across his lap right there in the dining room, straddling his thighs, Shiro’s hands settling on his hips, pulling him in—

His face goes hot. It’s not the heat anymore. That’s the first thing they checked him for after they tossed him in a shower when he got back. Any remnant desire is genuine, unclouded and undiluted by anything the Galra gave him. It’s covetous. The Blades keep few personal possessions, fewer indulgences, and Shiro is something more.

Shiro is something better.

 

* * *

 

The base isn't big, Keith says, prefacing the tour with that like it's an apology—like Shiro hasn't been locked in a cell for a year.

He's wrong, anyway. By any standard, the base is a small city—an entire asteroid’s worth of honeycombed rooms and passages, hallways three times taller than they have any reason to be. It's magnificent, utilitarian in a different way than the prison ship was, almost like a temple but if the Blades have a religion other than survival, they don't show it to Shiro.

Eyes follow them down every hallway, but they're staring at Keith as much. His red jacket is the brightest thing on the base—Shiro had to resist a shocked laugh when he first pulled it on, but it suits him. He looks like the hero in an action film and Shiro can't imagine him in anything else by the end of the morning.

Kolivan trails behind them and before long they've gathered a train. It's a line of ducklings in reverse—ganders following their sole and precious chick. Shiro doesn't know what that makes him. He's torn between low terror and a new warmth rising in the pit of his stomach because he's alive and free and more important than either fact: so is Keith.

The hangar bay blows the rest of the base away. The Arena was massive. The Galra prison with cells stacked one on top of the other beyond sight was vast. After a year in space, he's seen horrors and places grotesque in their size, but he hasn't seen anything like this. The bay is open on empty space, the view of it hazed around the edges by some invisible barrier. He realizes he forgot to ask where they are. It's not a planet; he knew, but he assumed it was a ship, something free in space—but the view behind the barrier is a rush of color, a slow-wheeling nebula without scale. It looks better than the photos from the telescopes back on Earth and those were colorized and beautified and this is _real_. 

Shiro stops without meaning to, bringing the whole line to a halt.

“Come on.” Keith tugs him forward. Shiro follows in a daze, trying to take in each individual piece—the ships, the stars, the illusion of fresh air, like he could walk out the door and be free.

Keith drags him to a row of ships that put the shuttle Shiro left Earth in to shame. If he had a week to marvel at each one he wouldn't know where to start, where to stop, what to ask. Keith pauses by a beast of a ship that has to be for combat. It looks like a modified fighter jet, spiked and gleaming. Keith leans against it, and in his jacket and gloves, he looks cool. More: he looks like he's _trying_ to look cool. Shiro imagines him on Earth, sunlit on some beachside road next to a car as red as the leather over his arms, stunning and windswept. And then he opens his mouth and starts explaining the specs, where he got it, what it's like to fly, babbling excited. It almost ruins the effect, but not really. Shiro ducks his head and tries to fight his smile before it pulls at his bandage.

“Maybe we can take it out later,” Keith says, stepping back from the ship, feigning nonchalance while his grin gives him away. “I can show you how to fly her.”

A little roughness sneaks into his voice on the tail of it. Shiro’s veins run hot at the sound of it, at the way the light gleams in Keith's hair and eyes, at the pull of his black cloth shirt across his chest. He's strong and he's—alive. He wears red and he loves flying; he eats too fast and he's warm like a furnace in bed, but he's the kind of perfect Shiro didn't know how to hope for.

The look on Kolivan’s face over Keith’s shoulder says no one is taking any ships anywhere, for any reason—not while Shiro is onboard, at least, and that's that.

Shiro has to fight himself to walk out of the hangar when they’re done. It’s the closest to outdoors he’s been in more than a year, he realizes. The platform before they boarded for Kerberos, the hot desert wind, the dusty noon air—or maybe Kerberos and the deep dark of the stars overhead, the ice all around them before they were taken.

Keith takes his hand again on the way out, pulling him in so close their thighs brush. Shiro nudges him with his shoulder, just to make him look up. The tour group breaks up as they move through the rest of the base. Presumably, Shiro isn't as exciting as expected. He wonders what Keith told them, or what they knew. Did they see his fights? Did they wonder what he'd do to Keith? 

He loses himself in the new train of thought, letting Keith pull him where he will, until a voice shakes him out of it.

“Keith. I'd like a moment with Shiro.”

Ulaz is the only one that uses his proper name, but part of Shiro can't trust him. He's familiar and Shiro knows why—and he knows Ulaz wasn't responsible for what happened but Ulaz was there and his mind can't dissociate the two.

Ulaz lets him sit and takes the seat across from him, hunching a little so they'll be within a head of eye-level. “You have questions.”

He does, but there's only one thing he needs clarified.

“Is he... okay?”

Ulaz sits back. “Keith?”

Shiro doesn't know how to be delicate about it. It's been weeks, and the taste of Keith hasn't left him. He drops his voice, almost regrets bringing it up first, but it's like tearing off a bandage—there’s no easy way to have this conversation. “Can you tell me what happened to him?”

Keith is a precious thing to them. Not some line soldier, not some fodder. That's plain as day, and plain in Ulaz’s face in that moment.

“He didn’t explain,” Ulaz says, half a question, but more resigned.

“He tried.” In sweat and tears and none of it made sense to Shiro at the time, but it didn’t need to. Keith needed him; that was enough.

“It was torture,” Ulaz says, staring down at his own hands. “Loss of control is hard for our kind. Trust is harder.”

He says it with the implication that Shiro has Keith’s and it’s wrong in some fundamental way that Shiro hasn’t been able to wrestle into logic yet. The conversation makes him feel exposed. “He couldn’t consent. He couldn’t agree like that.”

It’s shame. It’s fear. It’s the nagging certainty that everything they shared was built on something cruel.

“But could you? Did you do it out of desire?” Ulaz levels his eyes with Shiro’s again, holding him at the end of that look that has him running hot in guilt because he wishes he could say no, but—

“Yes,” he admits. “He's beautiful.” It was his first thought and his last. Keith is more than black hair and muscle, more than lean lines and blue eyes—but he is beautiful. Shiro would be blind and dumb not to notice.

Ulaz laughs. “I saw him with you. He was many things in that cell. Beautiful is not one of them.” Shiro burns red and Ulaz’s smile widens. It's not like the cell had showers. He pauses, letting Shiro’s dignity die in the wait, before he says softly, “Regardless, you didn't do it to take advantage of him. That's what matters.”

“But he didn’t have a choice—"

“No. He didn’t. Anyone could have been in that cell, or anything. I don't think most would have treated him as you did.”

Anyone or anything. There's a bite to it that says Ulaz has considered this possibility in depth and would like to never contemplate it again, but he's miscalculated. It's a new concept for Shiro. Anyone. Anyone could have had Keith, and he would have been helpless. Shiro has a vision of himself one cell, two cells over, oblivious, and Keith lying open and wanting and scared—

“Shiro.”

His fists are clenched, he realizes. He's shaking with the force of an emotion he doesn't have enough experience with to identify. It feels like someone else's anger and fear and he can step back enough to know it's irrational and strange, but he can't step far enough back to put the breaks on it. He has to make himself breathe, slow his heart rate, the same way they taught him at the Garrison—deep breath, hold, hold, and release—on repeat until he can feel his vision clearing.

The lights on the base are soft, but they feel too bright.

“Shiro.” Ulaz repeats his name, not moving.

“What—” Shiro can only make half a word before his mouth snaps shut. Air won't rest in his lungs right.

Ulaz gives him time. When he speaks again, his face is grave, but his voice is gentle. He catches Shiro’s gaze and holds it. “I imagine having him taken from you so soon was difficult.” He motions to his own face, drawing a line across his nose with one claw. “Is that how you got this?”

Shiro has to blink, take another breath, make the words make sense past the remnant rush of anger pulsing through his veins. “What?” he asks again, still trying to scour the image of Keith vulnerable and responsive under someone else’s touch out of his mind. The bandage on his face is something he’s used to tuning out, but the look on Ulaz’s face is a step from pity.

“When we found you, you were nearly broken.”

Broken. He doesn’t remember that last fight. He remembers what came before it, though. The word _airlock_ is done for him—there’s no context where it doesn’t make his heart skip. The taste of loss is like blood on the back of his tongue, still. He’s seen Keith hale and healthy, held him and felt his breath, but the imagined picture of his body floating in space is burned into Shiro's mind.

The grief was a blow greater than the one across his face or thigh. Shiro feels the words lock up in his throat, mired in the black mass of grief that lived there for days after Keith left. “They told me he was dead,” Shiro forces out past it.

Ulaz’s gaze darkens.

“They told me they pushed him out an airlock.” Shiro doesn’t let himself think about the words before he says them. Get them out, let them be someone else’s problem, at last.

Ulaz doesn’t speak, not for seconds that stretch. In the quiet, Shiro can hear the hum of the life support systems from the vent. Keith is waiting in the hallway—he can feel it like a second heartbeat and it's the only thing tying him to the seat. The mark on his face, the blood they must have found him in. It hadn't felt like giving up at the time. More like a slip. It was something inevitable when he had one thing to live for and had it torn away and tossed to the nothing, for nothing.

“I think if you had been… irretrievable, Keith would have felt much the same.”

Shiro opens his mouth, but he doesn’t know what to say. “Irretrievable,” he repeats because the word is too pretty.

“Bonds forged this way are hard to predict. You’re lucky care deeply for each other.” He trails off. “...But give it time.”

He stands abruptly and Shiro takes it as his cue to do the same. The conversation is over, but there’s some other thread to it he can’t pull apart, some unknown. Bonds. The word echoes in his mind.

“Shiro?”

Shiro turns back to him.

“Give yourself time to heal. You need it.”

All the wounds Shiro has left are superficial, surface-deep. They’re ugly, but he’s still fighting fit. They could send him on a mission tomorrow and he’d be ready. He wants to stretch his legs, move, do something. He rolls his shoulders, testing for the familiar burn across his back, but the salve Keith spread over the fresh scar there must have done its work. “Good as new, I think.”

Ulaz smiles at him and says gently, “That’s not what I meant.”

He lets those be his parting words. Out in the hallway, Keith is waiting for him, eyes wide in concern. Shiro smiles just to watch it melt away. They lost all of their remaining entourage in the wait; it’s just the two of them and Shiro feels a little of the tension in his gut spin out at the quiet.

“Where do you want to go now?” Keith asks, as if Shiro knows enough to say.

Shiro thinks and the only thing that comes to mind is the hundred science fiction films he watched as a kid. “Do you have an—observation deck? Is that a thing?”

Keith cocks his head to one side and a little smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. “Yeah. I think I know a place.”

Most of the base is utilitarian. The room Keith leads him to is no different. It’s built to be useful first, but it has its own beauty. The line of high windows show a bar of the murky space outside, starless, almost like the desert sky at sunset sped up, painted colors wheeling by. 

“Where are we?”

Keith shrugs. “A rock.” He moves in close, leans against Shiro's back so he can reach over his shoulder and point out the lensing from gravity of the black holes and the distant star, all the pieces that come together to keep the base secret and safe. He feels out of his depth, but in the best way. He wanted to be out here. He wanted to see this. Keith steps away and thumbs some hidden control on the wall and suddenly there are stars. 

Shiro gasps. They're in the air around him, suspended flakes of light tracing out a map of the galaxy around them. When he reaches out to touch one, the stars rush by him, leaving that single star hanging in front of him, its little planets circling it. 

"And we're here," Keith says, back at his side, waving his hand in the air to make the stars rush by them again until the twin black holes and star are rotating before them. Shiro touches it to see the light glare off his metal fingers. Keith takes his hand and shows him how to expand the map again, leading him to a spot on the edge of the galaxy, zooming inward in another blur of light. Shiro knows what he's looking at instantly because he had to memeorize every orbit and trajectory. 

"That's Earth," he says, directly Shiro's index finger to the tiny flicker of blue. 

Shiro turns to him. Some of the light is caught up in his eyes, like light through water. "Do you want to go there?" 

He meant it as an honest question. Part of him is human, part of him deserves to see it, but he realizes as soon as he says it that it's a selfish request. He wants to be the one to show Keith Earth, he wants to be the one to take him.

Keith's mouth opens and works for a moment. "Yeah," he breathes, finally. "Someday." He leans up for a brief kiss.

Ulaz was right; his wounds still ache. It's as good an excuse as any to end the day early. He lets Keith pull him back to their quarters and strip him down the same way he put him together and touch.

That's the sweetest part, and the part he can't level with: being cared for. Keith sits him down in the middle of their unmade bed and takes the bandage off Shiro’s thigh with tedious care.

“You’re healing,” he says. He goes slow, dabbing ointment, like Shiro's new skin is made of tissue paper. The wrap he ties around Shiro’s thigh is too loose the first try; Keith has to do it over with a quiet apology, and then one more time when he’s still not satisfied.

Shiro feels warmth curl through the pit of his stomach at the way Keith’s brow wrinkles in concentration. It’s not desire, or not only desire. “Good?” Keith asks. Shiro wonders how many times he’d do it over if it wasn’t. He wonders when he was asleep how much practice Keith got at it. If he cleaned the blood off Shiro's face the way Shiro cleaned him in the cell, or if he rested next to Shiro in the dark while Shiro slept.

At his silence, Keith’s gaze goes unsure. “Sorry—I’m still not very good at it—” He reaches to uncoil it again, but Shiro stops him with a hand on his shoulder. He's strength under Shiro's hands, muscle and bone and beautiful. Shiro draws a line up the soft hollow of Keith's throat with his thumb, marveling at the way it jumps with Keith swallows.

It's the first time they've been properly alone since he woke up. Keith’s breath catches up and the air between them changes. He presses in for a slow, careful kiss. He almost misses it when Keith's hand slides to the sheet half-pulled across Shiro’s lap and presses down, hesitant but brave.

And gentle. Always gentle, with Shiro.

“Can I?”

He doesn't need to ask, but the question almost levels Shiro and he doesn't know how to say that Keith shouldn't want to. Keith doesn't deserve to be saddled with all that Shiro is—and with all that Shiro isn't, all the pieces of him left on the floor of the arena and on the slab table where they cut away his arm and dignity and the parts of himself he still knew how to trust.

Keith is a fatal flaw in him. He's what Shiro wants most, and when he pushes without waiting for an answer, Shiro doesn't stop him.

 

* * *

 

“I'll take care of you,” Keith tells him, and means it. Shiro is warm under his hands and the sight of him still bruised, still a little broken, but healing makes Keith want to crawl over him and push him down and hide him from the room. The bandage over the bridge of his nose makes him look young. He looks like something that needs protecting.

His eyes close as Keith pulls the sheets away and takes him in hand.

“Is that—am I doing it right?” He's big. Keith touched himself, imagining what it would be like to have Shiro under his hands again. Those last moments between them were desperate, but this doesn’t need to be. They have time, for once. He works Shiro slowly, trying to memorize the feel of him, losing track of the kiss in the distraction because something so simple shouldn't have him worked up.

Shiro's breath catches against his lips in the shape of Keith's name. It breaks the last of Keith's self-control. He doesn't realize he's rutting against Shiro's bare, unbandaged leg until Shiro presses his thigh higher and gives him some leverage. His hands find their way to Keith's face, cradling. This close his eyes have a grey cast around the edges of his blown pupils, dark and deep. “Yeah, you’re perfect,” Shiro whispers.

The words make his own blood run hot—or hotter. Shiro is pliant under his hands. In the cell, he was hesitant, but Keith didn't have enough mind to take control the way he wanted. He regretted it, later, when all he had was the oversize prison shirt Shiro gave him and need still aching in him. Keith wants to make a place for himself there in Shiro’s lap. Getting out of the cell, coming back to base—none of it felt like this. None of it felt like home. Being near is all he wants and it's almost like the heat again the way it simmers through him, but this is only for Shiro. He can't get close enough.

He smothers his whine against Shiro's mouth before it can escape him, rocking his hips in a way he knows is embarrassing but feels too good to stop. He had other plans—better plans, laid and listed in those useless weeks after his rescue. A hundred specific ways to make it up to Shiro, and make him want this as much as Keith.

He knows Shiro's close when his lips go slack against Keith's. He pulls away, breathing hard in their shared space, dripping in Keith's hand. It's enough, but Keith can do more. He wants more. He wants to taste.

As soon as the idea occurs, it's stuck fast, a flash obsession. The memory of Shiro’s mouth on him is like a bruise he can't stop tracing his fingers over. Wet heat and soft lips and how his head looked between Keith's legs, bangs hanging and mussed.

He wants to be that, for Shiro. Keith pulls away and slides off his leg, down the bed.

Shiro chases him with his hands, but Keith doesn't give him time to question it. He bends and changes his grip, pausing to marvel before he presses his tongue to the head. It's a new taste, but good. Better than it should be. Everything in his head is twisted up in need. Shiro twitches and jerks back, his hands falling to the sheets, gripping. “You don't need to—” he tries to say, but it cuts off in a groan.

No, he doesn't, but he wants to. Something in his mind has short-circuited, maybe, because when he takes more of him in, the heaviness and the sound Shiro makes, it makes him almost as hot as having Shiro's hands on him.

Shiro threads his hand in Keith's hair, steadying, petting. “Go slow,” Shiro says quietly, and Keith can't tell if it's a warning or a plea.

He only pauses to intertwine the fingers of Shiro's other hand, flesh against metal. Shiro’s goes with it, humoring him. Hands, he remembers first. Even in the dingy cell, more bruised than not, Shiro was gentle and Keith needs it like praise.

Shiro shudders when he hums at the thought of it and the hand in his hair clenches tight for a perfect moment that blows straight through him. Gentle is good but needful is better and the way Shiro's hips judder into his mouth takes him by surprise, sliding deep enough to feel it. He forgets to go slow after that, forgets that it's supposed to be about moderation. He loses himself in the slide and heat until he's dripping between his own legs and Shiro is bowed over him, the muscle in his thighs twitching.

A hand fists in the back of his shirt and stays there, and that's how Keith knows he's close. It's what he imagined for himself: holding Shiro and he really is shaking. Keith can feel it.

He touched himself to the thought of it. He spread himself open in the shower they shoved him in as soon as he got back to base and tried to replicate what Shiro did to make him apart. A dozen nights in a row, waiting to get back to him.

Maybe it was the drug they gave him, or something off about the way human blood mixes with a Galra—or maybe it's Shiro. 

When he comes, Keith tries to swallow, but the sensation is new and he gets lost in it. can feel it running down his chin. Keith pulls off, dazed and fascinated by how close he is to his own edge and by the look on Shiro's face. He's still bowed over Keith. Even shadowed, even bandaged and bruised, he's beautiful. He blinks and swallows and then pulls Keith into his lap in one desperate motion, licking the taste of himself out of Keith's mouth.

“Was it good?” Keith asks when they part, past embarrassment. He needs to know, needs to hear Shiro's voice. It's primal.

“You—yes. Fuck, yes,” Shiro says, still half-breathless, working the loose pants down day enough to expose him and take Keith in hand. There's nothing better in the universe at that moment. He presses forward for a slower kiss, and another, letting his hips rock into Shiro's grip.

In the cell, it felt different  It was desperation then; when he came it was by necessity. It left him bereft and only half satisfied, almost painful for how bad he needed it and how little it did to take the edge off. This time when release pulls through him, it makes the edges of his vision go bright and the warmth that spreads across his skin is all-encompassing. He feels it beat with his pulse, matching the little, shaking breaths ghosting over his temple. Shiro holds him through it, close and hot and perfect.

When Keith is at the edge of oversensitive, he pulls his hand away and settles it on the bare skin of his waist. “Keith.”

His voice is wrecked. Keith digs his hands in Shiro’s short hair and pulls his head down, hiding his face against his shoulder where the collar of the dark shirt exposes his collarbone. Shiro kept him safe. Shiro cared for him, clothed him, wiped the sweat from his face and held him.

Keith’s going to return that, in full. Whatever Shiro needs from him, whatever Shiro wants; it’s all his.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!! Come request stuff, say hi, or watch my life slowly break down during finals on [tumblr](http://arahir.tumblr.com) and [twitter](https://twitter.com/arahir)!


	2. Chapter 2

They fall into an easy pattern. Keith goes about his life and Shiro follows, lingering around the edges. There are strategy meetings and planning sessions and moments where it looks they want Shiro nowhere near it, but Keith’s quiet glare puts an end to all of that.

Privately, Shiro wonders if they don't have a point.

The bandage comes off his face a week after he wakes up. Whatever the Blades use for wounds, it works fast—on the surface, at least. It still aches deeper down and Ulaz informs him calmly once Keith is out of earshot that he's lucky it didn't cave his face in.  

Lucky, he means, like Shiro is lucky to be alive. Don’t dwell on what you lost, count your lucky stars—of those, he has exactly one: the heat in his arms at night and the soft breath he wakes up to. That's fact. There's no sentiment in it. Keith is the best piece of luck he's had in a long time, and still that sells him short, Shiro thinks as he sits on the cold table and Ulaz picks at the edge of the bandage.

Keith walks back in the room, a pile of clothing in his arms. It’s a new set for Shiro because his current clothes aren’t made for more than lounging. He smiles at Shiro and it’s the kind of smile that changes his whole face, the kind of smile that makes the edges of Shiro’s mouth twitch up on instinct, trying to mimic. It steals his breath and leaves him empty. There’s nothing he has that makes him worth that. It’s unearned.

That looming dread that's been haunting him since he woke up warm and wanted rushes to fill in his gaps.

Keith is valuable and valued, loved and needed, and Shiro can't live up to that. Even before the arena, he wasn't worth this kind of devotion. And now he's fought and maimed and killed, and it's one thing to accept that blood on his own hands, but not on Keith's.

Everything about this is temporary.

"Ready?" Ulaz asks, drawing him back to ground.

Keith sets down the pile beside Shiro, placing a hand on his shoulder. Shiro nods and closes his eyes, holding himself still as he can while Ulaz peels the bandage off his face. The new skin—the scar—feels strange and naked without the gauze, and when he opens his eyes, his vision is full and clear for the first time in days. The first thing he sees is Keith, head angled to get a good look. The look on his face shifts from curious to soft, lips quirked in a little, private smile.

He’s perfect.

"It looks cool," he huffs like he actually believes it.

Ulaz hands him a square of synthetic glass, a mirror—it seems unaccountably vain that the Blades would have one at all—and he almost refuses it out of hand. He's never cared about appearances, not really, but that's the luxury of someone that has them.

Not anymore. The image he sees when he holds it up is unrecognizable. The white hair hanging over his eyes, the hard, wide jaw, and the scar, raw and monstrous, like a mark of evil in some child's story. He stares so long he forgets he's not alone, but then Keith pulls the mirror away and the grotesque image is replaced by his face. Soft black hair, eyes with color and depth, and that smile.

The contrast between them is laughable. It's a joke, he thinks, because there's no reality where he’s a match for that now.

Keith's face falls at whatever expression Shiro is making, but there's nothing to say. Shiro doesn't want to be coddled through this. “I’m fine,” he says in answer to Keith’s unspoken question. “It’s just—different.”

He stands and grabs the clothes off the table and uses them as an excuse to hide in the closed antechamber off the main room of the infirmary. It doesn’t have a mirror, but it does have a door and that’s a relief. He takes longer than he needs to to pull on the slick black cloth and the vest over it. He wouldn’t have fit in either before, but now his body is honed for it and the muscle under his skin stands out in clear lines.

It’s good there’s no mirror. It’s good Keith’s not there to watch him. The scars he’s indifferent toward, but the change are deeper and wider than that and seeing his new self juxtaposed against Keith makes him into some kind of parody. The arm is still the worst part. He leaves it pressed against the wall as an anchor while he leans his forehead against the cool metal for a moment, letting it ease him. The hand is a thing made for tearing and burning, a thing meant to be used but not outside of a fight—and all of this is outside of a fight. Keith is the furthest thing from a battle.

He needs to be useful.

 

* * *

 

After he musters himself and steps outside, after Keith is done picking at the cloth and admiring him, after the other Blades are done ribbing them both for it, he hunts down the person he least wants to talk to and most needs to.

Kolivan commands the kind of respect Shiro has only read about, and Kolivan doesn’t take it for granted. Part of Shiro wonders if he notices it at all. He’s not officially the leader of anything, but everyone looks to him first and last and for Shiro personally, there’s a double terror there.

 _He’s Keith’s father,_ Shiro said once, in mild despair, and Ulaz had laughed.

 _No, he’s worse,_ he’d replied. _He’s his commanding officer._

He’s close enough to both. Part of Shiro can’t help but want to impress him because of it. Keith lets him go alone. He’s been trying to give Shiro space and he appreciates it even though most of him wants to cling and stay close still. The bond drives him by instinct, but more than that Keith is a friend. He’s someone to share a look with, someone to lean on, someone to talk to.

Kolivan, it turns out, is oddly predictable and oddly antisocial; he and Shiro are the only two on the base that frequent the observation room Keith showed him on his first day. Shiro sees him coming and going and they’re never there together but there’s nothing else down that hall.

He’s there, like clockwork. The star map is active and Kolivan is picking through it, drawing lines in imagined constellations. He’s a workaholic and Shiro knows what that looks like. It’s something the other commissioned officers at the Garrison used to joke about with him: always the extra mile, always the extra sim run, always.

“Can I help with anything?” Shiro opens with once the door whooshes shut behind him and realizes in a breath that it’s the entire conversation he wanted to have in one question.

Kolivan doesn’t look up, but he waves one hand and the map disappears. “No,” he says, stepping toward and past Shiro for the door. It’s a dismissal, clear as day. He doesn’t trust Shiro yet and Shiro knew, but it’s still crushing.

“Don’t you want information?” Shiro asks as the door opens again, panic starting to wind through his chest. “I can give you their patrol schedule,” Shiro tries, speeding to keep up with him as he steps down the hallway. Shiro’s used to being the biggest thing in the room; everything on the base but Keith dwarfs him. “I can tell you anything.”

Kolivan pauses by a lift door, finally. “We have their schedules. Ulaz was embedded on the base. No doubt they’ve been changed by now, regardless.”

“Then I can work on ships—”

“No.” Kolivan turns to him fully. His eyes aren’t harsh, but the set of his jaw says there’s no discussion being had here. This is him tolerating Shiro and his patience only stretches so far. “How many ships have you seen the inside of?”

 _I need to do something,_ he wants to say without saying it, without sounding so desperate. Keith showed him how to fly his confiscated Galra fighter and it was something he’d forgotten he was good at. There’s only one thing he’s been good at for the past year and he doesn’t want to dwell on it now. “Two,” he says, “but I can learn,” and he knows he sounds like a child.

He is one, to Kolivan.

The lift doors open and Kolivan steps inside. Shiro doesn’t know if it’s his place to follow. It’s almost certainly not. “I can help. I can do something,” he says and doesn’t try to hide the desperation this time.

The door starts to close but Kolivan stops it, staring at him, almost kindly. “You are doing something.” He’s sleeping and eating and spending time with Keith and—healing. He’s no better than a pet and it’s killing him in little, slow ways.

“Please,” he tries.

 

* * *

 

Ulaz brings him the datapad later, with Kolivan’s permission. It’s locked and crippled, but it has access to what passes for internet in a society that’s been traveling the stars longer than humans have had the ability to write. Keith’s eyes go wide and then pleased when he sees. He helps Shiro learn to use it and for a day the distraction is enough to ease the push-pull of panic wending its way through him in every quiet moment.

At night, Shiro starts asking questions. The net the Empire has isn’t what he’s used to. It’s fractured and confused, brought down to specifics he doesn’t know how to look for, so he asks, and Keith answers everything as best he can and when he can’t, they search it together. One night they fall asleep together with the datapad propped on Shiro’s knees, watching nonsense videos and dramas where all the cast is played by creatures beyond his imagination.

Most at least. Some he remembers from the Arena, and that’s the part that starts to weather at him. The distraction of the datapad and Keith’s company is almost enough, but not quite. There’s a constant sense of wrongness pulsing through him in every quiet moment, like he’s in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing, and time is getting away from him.

The first panic attack takes him by surprise. It comes in the morning and it doesn’t seem like it should. It seems like something that should happen in the evening or in the dark, not leaning on the wall waiting outside a strategy meeting. Keith argued him there, but it’s not his place. They don’t have a reason to trust him yet and Shiro respects it.

But standing there waiting like some kept thing is unbearable. He’s useless to them like this. He’s useless to Keith. He kicks off and starts walking, but there's nowhere to go. He's been up every hallway and if he thought the base was massive before, now it feels oppressively small. No sky, no sun—nothing but the hangar comes close and that's where he ends up.

The colors outside aren’t a comfort this time. He’s been out once. It wasn’t enough. Now, the colors overwhelm him. In space for a year and he’s seen the inside of a cell, the Arena, and this base. A hundred thousand planets and he’s stuck in stasis.

For the first time it occurs to him: what if the arm can’t be fixed? What if the intel they’re waiting on never comes? A vision of himself stuck in limbo for the rest of his life plays before his eyes—and Keith, tied down there with him. He would stay. He would be devoted. It would kill Shiro, slowly.

By the time he gets back to the room, it’s empty. It's all he can do to make himself lie on the bed and not curl up on the familiar hardness of the floor and it’s bizarre that he misses any part of captivity, but routine is something.

When Keith walks in a few minutes later, he doesn't say a word. Distantly, Shiro realizes he must have been waiting and watching, giving Shiro his space. He doesn’t know how long he was gone. It could be lunch. It could be past dinner.

There's the soft sound of clothes dropping on the floor, and then the bed dips and there are arms sliding around and under him, pulling him in, so his head is resting in Keith's chest. He's like a furnace, even under normal conditions, and space is cold. There's nothing left in him to resist that pull.

Even as he thinks it, there's new panic curling in the pit of his stomach. He can't pin it down long enough to tell where it's coming from, but it's pervasive—

“Hey, you’re okay, right?” Keith asks in the dark.

Shiro doesn’t answer, but he lets Keith pull him up into a slow, soft kiss that almost dispells the panic. Almost.

 

* * *

 

Keith knows Shiro. He knows what his breath sounds like when he has a nightmare. He knows the shade of his eyes in desire. He knows that something in him is hurt, but everything can be fixed in time.

Shiro takes to joining him in the training room. Keith is still off missions by unspoken accord—Shiro can’t be left alone on the base and no one will say as much, but it’s true and Keith is more than willing to be his guardian. The shirt Keith cut him looks comically oversized where he’s sitting against the wall.

He catches glimpses as he swings his sword against the drones. One eye is always on Shiro. He’s healing, little by little, but Keith can’t help but want more, faster. Ulaz tries to moderate him, but in this one thing, Keith can only be optimistic. They’ve beat the odds before and this is easier.

“What are you working on?” Keith asks when he stops for a breather.

Shiro glances up and then back down, his mouth twisting. “Just—I don’t know. Trying to do something.” There’s a wrinkle between his brows again. “You guys aren’t big on organization, though.”

 _You guys_. The Galra. It’s oddly sweet to hear the Empire he’s been trying to undermine his entire life summed up like that. Keith laughs and swings the blade up, switching hands, shaking out the stiffness in his fingers. “Don’t say that—you haven't heard Kolivan’s bureaucracy rant yet.”

He swings again, testing the heft. He tried to train after his rescue, in those painful interim weeks, trying to distract himself with motion, but the blade was sluggish. Some days it wouldn't transform at all. It's back up to full flourish and the only downside is the dozen or so jokes made at his expense over it.

When he looks up again, Shiro's eyes are devoted to him. He's not pretending to look at the datapad anymore.

“Bureaucracy,” he says, drawing the word out, incredulous.

“Yeah,” Keith laughs. “There's a joke that's why he joined up. Drove him nuts.”

Shiro grins and then laughs to himself. “I guess we're not so different after all.”

There's a joke in there that Keith doesn't get, but he's right. Kolivan and Shiro would get along fantastically if Kolivan would let him do more than—nothing. He still has his reasons but Keith is tired of watching Shiro crawl out of his own skin and up the walls. “We can spar if you want,” Keith offers, testing the water.

“No, it’s okay. I like to watch,” Shiro says, a smile playing at the corner of his eyes.

Keith feels his face split in a grin. Of course he does. There are marks on his hips from those hands; it’s the first time in his life his body is good for something more than fighting. It’s new to be wanted. Shiro sees his smile and ducks his head to hide his own and it’s good. It’s the first time he’s smiled in earnest since the bandage came off. Keith has tried kissing the frown off his face, working Shiro into heat and frenzy, distracting him in a hundred little ways, but this is good, too.

 _It’s not the scar_ , Shiro said to him once in the dark when he felt Keith’s fingers tracing it.

He picked apart those words for hours later, with Shiro’s arm over his chest and his quiet breath filling the silence. It’s something if it’s not the scar. Maybe he’s wounded in some deeper way than Keith can salve and bandage, but there’s a way to heal it. There’s always a way.

So Kolivan doesn't want Shiro on missions yet. Keith can work around it. He has been. He’s shown Shiro how to fly his favorite ship and wasted an entire day digging up the best, worst holovids he could. He’s being what Shiro needs. He’s patching him up, putting him back together piece by piece. This is one more.

“It’ll be fun,” Keith says once he has the drone pinned. “You scared I’ll win?”

Shiro laughs. “You would,” he says, so sure.

Keith isn’t. The part of him raised in war wants to test himself against this new challenge for purely selfish reasons. He knows every other part of that body; the way Shiro fights is the last piece he needs to fit it together. It’ll be good for Shiro to stretch his legs.

“Come on. One match?” he asks, teasing, trying to tug him out of his self-built shell.

Shiro looks back down to the datapad and Keith sees the moment he breaks. He sighs and sets it aside and then folds his arms, staring up at Keith. _Convince me._

They don’t speak. Keith keeps his gaze fastened tight, but he reaches up to tie back his hair. It’s his best card to play, though he’s still bad at this. He loses his nerve every time he tries to be something seductive; Shiro is the only one he’s ever wanted to try for, and he’s too easy a mark anyway.

Keith exaggerates the motion, breathes, lets the sweat-damp cloth of the dark training gear pull across his chest and the hollow his throat as he tugs his hair into compliance. More of it falls forward than doesn’t. Shiro’s gaze follows the fall of it and then slides to the muscle of Keith’s arms and even from this far away, Keith can see the way his eyes darken and can hear the shift in his breath.

He puts down the pad and Keith knows he's won.

 

* * *

 

Planning a war takes time and energy. The privilege of living on a rock without orbit and days and nights is that no one can tell him when he’s been up too long. Thace is the only one that bothers to keep track—the only one that would confront him about it, but he’s still a day out. Extraction takes time and it's harder when you're trying to make off with the codes to something so wrapped in secrecy.

Ulaz was on the team that attached the arm to the Champion’s body, and still, the druids told him nothing. They need information. They’ve been trying to get it for weeks.

All of this, Kolivan thinks. All of this for Keith.

Thace works fast. Their deepest imbed, by far, and most endangered. Kolivan lives a perpetual cycle of waiting for his check-ins with the expectation that it will never come, the mild shock when it does. It takes time. The They have to run the code through two separate systems before letting the signal into the base; it takes time.  Kolivan spends it rebraiding his hair absently.

The message comes in like clockwork. When he opens it, the message is a single line: that code that means everything is situation normal and Thace is inbound. Three days out, still, because no one goes from the Empire to the base in a straight line for anything—even this.

He imagines telling Keith and keeps the thought for himself, a rare selfish urge. He’ll be the one to tell Keith, and his eyes will light up and this worst part of his life will turn to something better in an instant. They came so close to losing him. The Champion is polite and quiet and smart. It could be worse. It could be so much than this quiet, broken thing haunting Keith’s footsteps.

He stands and for a moment he thinks he knocked something in the motion because a sound blares through the room, comically loud. It takes him a moment to identify it because he oversaw the alarm’s installation but they’ve never had cause to hear it.

For that instant, it’s almost funny. His first thought is that it’s an error, some mistake, that someone foolish tripped it, but he trusts his men and he knows in his gut that they’re never so lucky. The base-wide alarms can only be activated purposefully. It was inevitable.

Later, he’s ashamed of his hesitation. Later, he’s shocked at how long it takes him to understand, but there’s been no perimeter breach and there's only one thing on the base that can hurt them. There’s only one unknown and they let it in on a whim. He’s a fool.

It takes minutes to reach the training deck in question. Keith’s favorite, he notes dispassionately, before he’s even sure that’s where the alarm began. It’s deck three and they have too many and it takes too long.

He’s not the first one there. Antok and three other Blades are already in the room, but Kolivan registers them as a peripheral concern.

The first thing he reads is the pop and hiss, the ozone tang of burning metal, something he knows like terror because it's the last thing you want to smell when the hull of a ship is all that's standing between you and open space.

Blood, too, under the rest. It coats the ground, shining darkly.

The Champion has his arm through the floor. He's gripping it around the elbow with his other hand, blood steaming as it slides down to where the metal of the prosthetic is violet white with heat. There's yellow light in his eyes, flickering like a lamp. There's the quintessence, Kolivan thinks distantly. There's the eventuality he feared most. Haggar’s pet project, come to heel.

And he's crying.

Keith is kneeled on the floor beside him, hand on his shoulder, talking fast. There's blood on him, too, across his cheek, his armor torn across the shoulder, not quite down to the bone. The other Blades that beat him to the scene are circling them loosely, at a loss without a clear enemy—but there is one, plain as day. They've been blinded to it out of love but Kolivan can piece each together each step that lead them here clear as sad, quiet sounds he’s making, and there's no path back.

He’s angry, but the instinct extinguishes itself the instant it rises. Everyone on base was on explicit orders to not let the arm be activated in killing distance, but there’s no _I told you so_ for this.

It will hurt enough on its own. They can't protect Keith from this. Time isn't on their side, and programming is hard to break from for long. It’s a wonder the boy can hold it off as long as he has. Kolivan runs out the possibilities—the ways Haggar could manipulate this creature to her will, all she might have seen, all she might know now of them. Every moment the Champion lives is a risk.

“Step back,” Kolivan orders the room.

The Blades comply, but Keith doesn’t bother to look up, so sure the order doesn’t apply to him here. He’s been the exception for too long.

“Keith.”

He looks up, gaze stuck between defiant and pleading. _Fix this_ , he seems to say, and at the same time: _I can make this better, please, let me try._ Kolivan has always been his last, desperate stop. Even if every other Blade on the base told him no, it was Kolivan’s word that set it in stone.

Next to him, Shiro makes an animal sound. There’s sweat pouring off him now from the effort of holding himself back, eyes blinding bright. It must be an agony, bare hand on searing metal, writhing against the floor like some broken thing in its last throes. There won’t be much of him left to salvage.

Kolivan draws his blade and steps forward as Keith’s eyes go wide in terror. “No—no, wait—”

The blade is an extension of his will. It’s been a part of him for longer than his memory can stretch, in truth. It slides through the air like it’s in an open vacuum, unrestrained and unresisted.

Keith’s scream echoes in his ears for hours after.

 

* * *

 

 

 _Remote activation program,_ the computer reads aloud for him, later, in the safety of the control room.

At the periphery of his vision, other words scroll past: _failsafe_ and _trigger_ , _combat_ and _kill_. They knew when Thace left. They knew what he was taking with him; it makes sense. Haggar wouldn’t leave this transgression unchallenged and she’s never been as oblivious to their plans as they hope.

What he’s unused to is the personal way it aches, just below his uppermost rib where the armor folds across his chest. Years since he was wounded and this is worse and new.

“We couldn’t have known,” Ulaz says softly.

No. They couldn't have, but Kolivan should have. It was a stupid mistake.

“I—I thought he needed to get out, I thought he needed—” Keith bites off his sentence with a curse Kolivan doesn’t remember anyone teaching him. He repeats it, louder, harder. He's on the verge of crying. “Fuck.”

There's nothing for it. He's not the child he was; for some mistakes, there's no balm.

Shiro is spread out on the table in the infirmary under heavy sedation, a broken toy without all his parts. They cleaned him up after Kolivan removed the arm, but there's still enough bruising around the joint to make it grotesque. It seemed expedient. The boy passed out with the blow and that was the only mercy.

Keith is sitting on the table with him, head in his hands like a mourning bride at a graveside. Kolivan tries not to notice the wetness under his eyes and the way the blue there shines like a bruise in the soft infirmary light, though it’s only been a day. Some bonds are strong.  

“...The arm can be repaired,” Kolivan offers, at a loss.

It's not like him to offer assurances; Keith doesn’t answer, doesn’t show he’s heard. He drags his fingers across Shiro’s scar and hides his face in the gesture, turning away. Kolivan takes it as permission to leave them. Ulaz follows a step behind.

There are words Kolivan wants to say. His orders were explicit and clear for everyone on the base: don’t test yourself against the Champion. Don’t let down your guard. Don’t invite disaster. But the punishment is more than enough.

“You didn’t—” Ulaz says softly, and cuts the question short because Keith is far beyond listening distance and still too close for Kolivan to give voice to a reality where he brought the blade down on the boy’s neck.

He doesn’t know how to answer. The most expedient solution was clear and, for the first time, beyond him. The surprise of it was that he didn’t do it for Keith. The thing that comes back to him when he remembers that moment is the sweat on the boy’s face, the terror in the dark of his eyes when the yellow receded. He fought so hard, for so long.

“No.” Kolivan says.

Ulaz lets it rest for a moment, and then says quietly, “Good.”

He doesn’t look at Kolivan, but the implication is clear, a truth Kolivan has tried to deny for weeks but not where it counted. Keith’s pain is writ large across the base. He drags it after him everywhere he goes, like a child with a blanket that’s worn and torn beyond usability. If the boy died, Keith would live, but he wouldn’t be the same. There are some realities even Kolivan is too much a coward to face.

The shock of it is that he didn’t do it for Keith. In the aftermath, he sees the boy’s face behind his eyes. Kolivan knows what it’s like to fight beyond reason, when the last thing you have is survival. It’s how the Blades have made a place for themselves in this Empire when no other cause made sense: survive. Just that.

Thace arrives a day early and it's a weight off Kolivan's mind, but only in the barest sense. Keith was Thace’s child the moment they met and this is his mess to clean up as much as Kolivan's, in different ways. Delegating has always been the hardest part of the job, but he learned that lesson years past.

He stays to watch Thace disembark from his pilfered fighter—a newer model, something for Keith to sink his teeth into later, and he'll need that.

Keith is there to meet him, arms folded, still quiet and dressed in sorrow. Thace pulls him into an unwilling hug and the boy melts against him, so small. He’s still a child, Kolivan reminds himself. Even by human standards.

The repair is fast, simpler than Kolivan thought it could be. He’s no good with tech and worse with healing, and for a moment it seems that easy. New wires, a new code—the boy wakes up from surgery and gone is the manic, yellow-eyed thing Kolivan had to put down. He doesn’t stay to watch their reunion, but he can feel it in the air: a kind of miasma, an agony that should feel exasperating but has to give. It will pass. All things have before.

The boy comes to him the morning after he wakes. The conversation goes poorly from the start.

“What happens if I leave?” Shiro asks him in the quiet of the observation deck, trailing the fingers of his new hand through the stars, watching them scatter at the motion.

“...Do you want to leave?”

Shiro doesn’t hesitate. “No.” Something like relief courses through Kolivan, but then the boy opens his mouth again and extinguishes it cold. “I can’t leave. We have a bond. He's stuck with me.”

The bitterness in it is a shock. His soft demeanor gone in that breath, and there’s the Champion again.

Choose your words carefully, Kolivan thinks, but he's not up to lies and pretty phrasing. If he knows this boy, and he thinks he’s starting to, he wouldn’t appreciate it anyway. “You're no threat to him now. The arm is safe. You're no threat to anyone you don't mean to be.”

Shiro looks down at it, unconvinced, like it’s something alien—and it is. All of this must be, to him.

“Why didn't it break when I tried to kill him?”

It takes Kolivan a second to understand he’s not talking about the arm. The bond, he means, and the question sends Kolivan flashing back to the first time Keith asked where his parents were. It was a question with an answer too simple to satisfy.

 _They're dead,_ was honest. _They're dead, but you have us,_ might have been better, if he'd thought of it in time. _They're dead, but they never wanted to leave you,_ was close enough to honest, but still bit deep enough to hurt and Kolivan didn’t realize it until after the words left his mouth. It took a night, in the end, and more words than he'd thought possible to bring Keith back to ground. This is the same and worse. He hasn’t known this child like he knows Keith; he can’t begin to pick the words that will comfort him. Honesty is his only tool, but he's never had skill at wielding it.

“Because you love him, I suspect.”

Shiro’s face doesn't change. “I hurt him,” he says quietly. The blood on Keith’s cheek and the cut on his shoulder, healed the same day he got them, not a mark left in their place.

 _He's been hurt worse,_ Kolivan wants to say, but doesn’t. Or: _the two aren't mutually exclusive. The things you love have the greatest capacity to harm you._ But the boy is already turning to go.

Kolivan tries to see it through his eyes. A life on Earth, in peace, and a year spent captive, killing to survive. One beautiful thing he’s had and tried to protect and almost seen undone by his own hand. Out of habit, Kolivan slips his hand over the blade strapped to his side and lets that moment come back to him. The blood and heat and pain in the boy's eyes. “You didn't want to.”

Shiro pauses at the door, staring at the hand in the violet light of the hallway as the door opens before him.

“You didn't want to hurt him,” Kolivan continues, but he knows as the words leave his mouth that they’re not adequate to the task. The boy walks out and there’s nothing Kolivan can say to fix this for him.

 

* * *

 

The cracks are hairline across him, and they widen at the smallest things.

The day after the repair, Keith climbs in bed with him and takes the prosthetic hand in both of his and Keith brushes his lips over the knuckles of Shiro's Galra hand like it's something precious. Like he's something precious.

And all he can think is, _I've used that to cut the life out of a dozen bodies—or more_. Men and women and neither of those; creatures and aliens and near-humans and Galra, just like Keith. Did they ever throw a Blade in the arena against him? What if they’d decided it was less entertaining to leave Keith in his cell?

What if they'd brought him to the arena?

Keith is still hovering over his hand, holding it in both of his own like it's delicate, valuable, worth protecting. There's concern in his eyes. Shiro realizes he's shaking.

"It's okay," Keith says with the same unshakable confidence he has for everything between them.

It's not.

What it comes down to is: Keith is whole, and Shiro is a ruin. A year in the arena has taken his arm and his worth. He doesn’t know himself. He doesn’t know his body or his mind.

It's a farce, right from the start.

Time starts to warp and slide past itself in his mind. The panic beat of his heart is too regular a companion. The walls of the base were wondrous at the start but they start to feel like a cage. Three nights in a row he wakes up in sweat with the imagined taste of blood on his lips and a sound like electricity burning against his ears, fire behind his eyes where they're clenched shut in the dark.

Keith is implacable calm. He settles a hand in Shiro’s hair, where it's too short to pull but long enough to bury his fingers in and tease. He's being gentle, like Shiro needs that, like Shiro deserves that—like Shiro isn't the most dangerous thing in the base. His hands are so small. Shiro could hold both of them in one hand and break them with a thought. It's a horror, an image he can't get rid of. Shiro thinks, _I could hold your head in my hand, wrap my fingers around your neck, and you wouldn't even try to stop me._

He can't breathe through the shame of what he hasn’t done.

"Keith..." Ulaz's voice from the door pulls him back from the edge of sleep. "He's going to get worse before he gets better. Be prepared for that."

The hand in his hair stills.

"What?" Keith sounds lost.

The words are like a bad omen. All his splintered edges grate against each other. He can’t fit in his own skin anymore.

It’s the first moment he knows what he’s going to do, because he can tell himself to be ok but he can’t believe it. None of this is his fault, but he knows it like some esoteric fact he had to memorize and spit out back at the Garrison to pass a test.

If he leaves, Keith has a chance. He has a shot at something better down the line. That’s what he tells himself. That’s the thought that beds itself in his mind and grows and grows.

That next night, Keith comes back from training dripping sweat, a fresh bruise across his jaw from the hilt of Antok's blade.  He lets Shiro pull the armor off of him, breath catching at the slide of cloth over his damp skin. He's still half dressed when his patience breaks. He spins them and pushes Shiro against the wall and kisses him until they're both out of breath and he's hard against Shiro's hip. Shiro slides a thigh between his, presses in and up until Keith is sighing against his cheek. He moves like a tide and Shiro lets it sweep him up this one last time. Their clothes come off between the wall and the bed and then Keith is in his space, bare and eager.

And happy.

He wears it like a second skin, around Shiro more than anywhere else; it's contagious, but unearned. None of this is earned. He falls into it anyway: the hands on his shoulder and hips, calloused and strong, maneuvering Shiro full body back on to the bed, the tongue sliding between his lips over-eager. Keith is heavy and he doesn't do anything by halves, this least of all.

There's still something awkward in it, but they meet halfway and that's more than enough. It’s more than a distraction, too. The body in his arms, pressed flushed against his hips, ribs heaving under his hands. Shiro realizes he's hard and Keith hasn't done anything but slide against him. He could live in bed here with Keith and be happy and be worthless.

He makes a breathy sound against Shiro's neck, one Shiro knows by heart now. Keith likes to be touched like he's starving for it and it’s unfair that Shiro is the only one he wants it from. He slides his hands down Keith’s back, pulling him in tighter. Keith rewards him with an open-mouthed groan, right against his neck.

"Harder."

Shiro laughs, low and breathless, surprise warring past his resignation. "What harder?" The more he wants, the less he knows how to ask for it and Shiro can surmise but it's still a thrill to hear him like this.

Keith groans again, almost a whine, angling his hips in tighter between Shiro’s legs and the pressure is so sweet Shiro’s own moan takes him by surprise. Keith stills at the sound and then chases it, biting at Shiro’s throat, rolling his hips, building a rhythm. It's too soon and he wants this to last in his mind, wants to feel it in the morning when he wakes up in a ship on the other side of the quadrant. If he has to leave, he can take this much with him.

But Keith likes everything fast, and Shiro has to tighten his hold on Keith's hips, keeping him close and still. Keith whines against his cheek, blinking, trying to vocalize some question while he squirms and the pressure building between them starts to subside. It's ridiculous that he could come like that, from a warm body and few artless movements. Only because it's Keith.

Keith groans and twitches. "What—what's wrong?" he manages between breaths.

Shiro doesn't answer, but pulls him up higher so he doesn't have to bend his neck to kiss Keith the way he wants to. Keith goes with it, returning the kiss until he breaks away a frustrated groan and Shiro forgot—Keith is stronger than him. Everything here is at his whim, and his patience only stretches so far. He's reminded with forceful clarity. Keith reaches down, pulling Shiro’s metal hand off the blankets where it's clenched in the blankets, threading their fingers and pulling it up to his side, to the dip under his ribs.

On instinct, Shiro flinches back. The skin is too delicate, too soft, and the beat of Keith's heart under it is—repulsive against the metal.

Keith doesn't let go when Shiro tries to pull it back. “It's okay, Shiro.” He rocks his hips forward again and then pushes him down against the bed. His fingers draw a trail from his chest down.

Shiro isn't worth this effort.

He’s still artless about it, but he makes up for it with enthusiasm, and Shiro is swept along with him. It’s too fast, in the end; too brief. They’re both too eager. One day he’ll take his time and take Keith apart, piece by piece, he thinks to himself and then stops the thought short because it’s not true. The little sounds Keith makes, the low laugh against his lips, the wetness between his legs are all precious and he keeps the memory close when he cleans them and lies Keith down to sleep.

Precious and quiet. And alive.

Shiro could have killed him, twice over. A hundred times he’s held Keith’s life in his hands on a whim—but it’s not his whim. He's not the only one that's been in his head.

He waits for Keith's breathing to even out and slides out of bed. Keith sleeps light, but he's tired now and he doesn't twitch as Shiro moves around the room.

Before he goes, he bends and presses a kiss to his forehead, and another to the edge of his mouth when that doesn't seem like enough. He makes himself pull away when his instinct is to kiss Keith awake and stay and stay.

 

* * *

 

He's memorized what hallways will take him to the hangar the fastest, with the lowest risk of running into anyone else. It takes him through the kitchens—or what qualifies as a kitchen there. The first time though it reminded Shiro of some gothic dungeon. A kitchen with a vaulted ceiling isn't quite right.

The thing he doesn't count on is it not being empty.

"You're leaving?" Ulaz asks from the table, almost like he’s been waiting right there for him. Shiro nods, hefts his bag higher, ready for an argument, but Ulaz laughs at him, low and quiet. "I won't stop you. You're not a prisoner here, Shiro.”

He knew. He knew that, but still, hearing it spoken aloud twists something up in him. Not a prisoner, but it’s been so long. He can’t stay.

Shiro walks past Ulaz where he’s sitting, watching Shiro without judgment.

“Do you have supplies?”

He nods again. The pods aren’t so different from Keith’s fighter and he’s got a good memory for ships, but he pauses. There’s one thing he forgot. No—there’s one thing he was too much of a coward to do.

“Will you tell him I’m sorry?” Shiro asks, not able to meet Ulaz’s eyes.

Ulaz doesn’t smile. “I’m sure you can tell him yourself,” he says after a moment, and it doesn’t make sense until Shiro hears the sound of footsteps beating down the hallway from the sleeping quarters. Dread rushes over him. Any confrontation but this. He can’t even turn to the door, but he hears the slap as Keith catches himself on the door frame and he hears the rasp of his breath. Shiro wonders if this was the first place he thought to look or if he’s running around the base since he woke up to Shiro, gone.  

“What's wrong?”

Shiro turns. He’s only half dressed and the panic in his eyes as he takes in the scene is so sure that Shiro can feel it from across the room

"You're leaving?" he asks, voice ragged. "Did I do something?”

"No, no. No, of course not." Shiro’s mind is too tangled up to pick apart what he wants to say. _Get out, get out,_ is still pounding through his head in an erratic rhythm. The longer he stays, the worse this will be.

Keith swallows. "Then why?"

Words won’t form. Shiro opens his mouth, tries to remember all his careful reasons, all the ways this won’t work. Only one sticks out.

"Because this wasn't your choice.”

That’s what it comes down to. That’s the truth that’s been haunting him since he woke up in Keith’s arms, since Ulaz explained what they both went through. Shiro can’t blame biology for what he feels, but Keith—Keith deserves better than arena fodder and a love built in desperation, on the cold floor of a prison cell. He deserves better than someone who's drawn his blood. He deserves better than this confused, ruined thing Shiro's become.

Keith frowns at him, confusion pulling at the corners of his mouth. “But I’m choosing it now.”

Shiro shakes his head. “I’m not worth it. I've—” Killed people. Killed innocents, torn through them to save his own hide, let himself become a tool, “—done too much.”

Both of them drop their gaze to his arm, out of habit.

“I’ve killed people, too,” Keith argues, cutting to the heart of it. “You didn’t even want to. I _wanted_ to.”

Images of blood and sand play behind his eyes on repeat. Want has nothing to do with it. In the arena it was about survival, and it was for nothing. For nothing. The picture of Keith against the floor of the training deck won’t leave his mind, the contrast of black and red and metallic grey all cast in violet—and the smell of blood, burning. It’s too much.

“I’m sorry,” Shiro says, and means it a hundred times over, in a hundred little ways. “I’m so sorry.”

He turns. The dark of the hallway to the hangar is a shock and a welcome one. Anything to put this out of his mind. Anything to escape it.

There are footsteps behind him, but he doesn’t slow. “Wait,” Keith says in desperation, a true plea.

He’s asked for too much from Shiro, not because Shiro’s not willing to give it, but Keith deserves someone he doesn’t have to beg common decency out of. He deserves someone who’s whole. He deserves someone who didn’t want to fuck him raw in a cell.

He steps out and Keith tries one more time.

“Shiro—wait—”

It's softer. His voice gets hoarse when he's hurting. The bolt it lodges below his collarbone buries deep and true, but it’s not enough to stop him.

He makes it to the hangar before his decision catches up with him.

Earth is a three day flight and he has everything he needs, but already the silence is unfamiliar. The wounded cast to Keith's eyes haunts him, and he knows he'll regret it.

He can't stay. Leaving is right, and the decision is made, but his hand won't flip the ignition switch.  The cracks in him widen and part. He can't stay, but there's nothing better for him waiting out there than what he's leaving behind, and there never will be. There are too many parts of Keith to remember them all right—and he realizes he's in mourning for what he's lost and he hasn't even left the base.

There are the pods, against the far wall, and then there’s Keith’s ship front and center with its glistening coating, a color indistinguishable from black but almost reminiscent of the shade of his eyes. _You’re pathetic,_ he thinks and pulls the hatch.

He sets himself down in the seat, pack thudding down beside him. He can't stay, but he can't leave. He needs to get out but that new pain thudding at the hollow of his throat and the thought of actually leaving for good and for all sends it spiking.

He can’t leave, but he can’t stay.

 

* * *

 

Ulaz finds Keith in one of the rare windowed hallways, nebula reflected dully on the black metal floor in front him, drawing his eye as he hugs his knees and tries not to feel lost. Ulaz settles beside him and lays an arm around his shoulders. It's been hours by now, and Keith has felt every one of them. Shiro is gone and there's no path to follow to get him back. His breath keeps catching on the realization as he remembers and forgets and remembers. It's like one of those terrible dramas they pass around where someone's moaning about an aching heart. It’s always lost or broken or stolen and now he gets it. Now he understands. It feels like something's been cut out of his chest and left him both emptier and heavier than he was.

"It hurts, doesn't it?" Ulaz asks.

If he speaks too loud, if he moves his lips too fast, his words will break. "I wasn't enough,” he says carefully.

Ulaz pulls him in closer until Keith's head is couched against his shoulder. "You're not supposed to be. You can only be what you are." He says it with a lightness that's out of place with Keith's mood and the dark.

"But he didn't want me,” Keith mumbles against the rough cloth of his shirt because words are easier to make when he’s not releasing them in the open air.

There's a rumble under his ear—an aborted laugh. "He wants you. Kolivan has been crying about it for weeks. He wants you, and everyone knows it." He lets that digest for a moment, brushing his knuckles against Keith's neck, carding through his hair where it's getting long over his shoulders. "We don't always know how much we mean to someone. Maybe he felt like he wasn't enough."

The concept is laughable. Shiro was the Champion of the arena, a star pilot from another world, incredible. The sight of him was unreal; he made Keith feel starry-eyed like he was a child watching some holovid with explosions and battles and a tragic, perfect hero. But Shiro was better. Shiro was solid and real and the strength in his limbs and the brush of his fingers could make Keith's blood sing.

Keith knows his own worth. A strong fighter, a good pilot, but there's no way to balance that equation. "But he didn't have to leave."

"He didn't."

Keith thinks he's agreeing, but then Ulaz pulls away, standing. He doesn’t look at Keith, keeping his eyes fixed on the window like they’re not the same stars they’ve all stared at as long they’ve been on base. “He didn't leave. His pod never took off."

 

* * *

 

Shiro hears the hatch to the ship open, but his head feels like it’s formed from lead and bound to his knees where they’re pulled up on the seat. It’s a child’s pose—one he would be ashamed of any other day.

He hears Keith’s soft exhale and footsteps, but he can’t move. Keith doesn’t speak. He kneels in front of Shiro and lets the quiet of the ship settle over them both. Wordless, he pulls Shiro’s head down so his face is pressed into the nape of his neck, the leather of his red jacket caught up against his forehead.

“Hey,” he says.

Neither of them speak for minutes. Shiro feels his breathing slow and the beating of his heart mediate itself below panic. The fingers against his neck are lined in familiar calluses, nails cut short. He doesn’t say more or move.

“Were you crying?” Keith asks, finally.

He was, he realizes. To himself, for himself. “It’s okay.” There's strength in his hand and under the skin Shiro’s nose is pressed against awkwardly. "You deserve this. Nothing you've done changes that."

When he speaks again it's breathless. "And it's okay if you don't get that right now. It's okay if you need to be quiet or be alone or be angry or—leave." The hand on the back of his neck tightens for a moment. "But take me with you? If I don't have you, I'm alone.  I don't want—" He takes a deep breath. "I don't want to be alone. But if you really don't want me to—"

He does, though. It was never about him not wanting. “You can do better.”

Keith tries to laugh. “Better than you? No such thing.” His hand squeezes the back of Shiro's neck. “...Let me come with you. Please.”

The plea is so genuine, like the moment he promised he would get Shiro out of that cell. He wants to give in to it so much. He wants to believe it’s that easy.

“Please,” Keith repeats, voice almost breaking on it. It’s desperate and Shiro can’t tell what’s the bond and what’s love and what’s the simple joy of having someone close, of having someone to smile at across the table at dinner. The flash of Keith’s eyes the moment before he ducks his head to laugh, the coarseness of his voice when he’s excited, the way his hair sticks up at breakfast—Shiro can’t lose that, he realizes. It doesn’t matter what it is. He can’t let it go.

"Yeah," Shiro says, and breaks.

He pulls back enough press a kiss against the corner of Keith's mouth, exactly where he left the last one. It's an apology, or something like it. Keith moves into it, deepens it enough to taste, but there's no heat in it. Shiro isn't sure who he's trying to comfort—both of them, maybe. Maybe that's how this is supposed to work.

When Keith pulls away, he doesn't go far, resting his forehead against Shiro's for another moment before he stands. His breath is still a little ragged.

"Hey, scoot over." Keith leans into his space and over the display and taps some sequence into the controls panel. The ship hums to life around them. On autopilot, probably, which sends a disappointment curling down his spine, and something else. The thought of piloting a ship for himself was half the appeal of leaving at all.

Keith pauses, hand stilling in mid-air, right over the screen.

He glances back at Shiro. His dark hair obscures all but one eye from this close. It's piercing and considering, and then he looks back to the screen and taps something that makes it go red.

"Why don't you pilot?"

It's a revelation. He should object—he's never flown this before, even though Keith showed him the basics, but he can't argue.

Keith sees the hesitation in his eyes from a foot away; he smiles. "I want you to."

The ship is incredible; he doesn't realize the risk Keith has taken until he's threading them between gravitational anomalies. It's a thrill and a rush and Keith is standing right behind him with a hand on his shoulder, and that's the first time he's felt truly useful in a year. Once they're through, Keith shows him how to key in coordinates and gives him a set to punch in with a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

The rest of the flight is Keith, leaning against the window, chatting like he doesn't usually, distracting Shiro from what drove him to the ship in the first place.

"Where are we going, anyway?" He tries to make it casual, but Keith's eyes are fastened to him, and he's still smiling a little.

"You'll see."

 

* * *

 

It's a desert planet, but not lifeless.

Landings are always rough in a new craft, but Keith directs him in, leaning against the seat, one gloved hand over Shiro’s on the controls. They set down on the edge of what might have been a lake in a former life, right outside a single story building that looks for all the world like a shoebox made out of mud. It's midday, but not hot, and the breeze is fresh.

“Safehouse,” Keith explains. He waves at the flat expense. “Sometimes there's water. Guess it hasn't rained in a while. Sorry.”

There's nothing to apologize for. When Shiro takes a step out of the hatch the ground sinks a little under his boots and Shiro realizes what he'd taken for a smattering of red pebbles in the white sand are flowers. Tiny, glittering succulents that he has to bend down to get a closer look at.

Somewhere above him, Keith huffs a laugh. When Shiro looks up, he's a wonder in the sun. The wind ruffles his hair; it’s been a year since he felt real wind, real sun, real earth. It’s been a year since he had time, and there’s no one he wants to spend it with more.

“Up for a walk?”

It's pleasant in the way nothing has been in so long he forgot there was something off in the first place. It's nice to walk, to have to watch his step, to have so much to look at. Every rock is a little fascination, every wisp of cloud. Once in the distance he sees something dark winging against the cliffs that takes his breath away. They stop on a hill a mile or so out from the little house because Shiro has to stop for a moment and for the second time that day, Keith has to kneel in front of him and pull Shiro’s head down against his jacket while he gathers himself.

Keith lets it pass without comment.

When they get back to the house, he keys a code into the door and steps aside to let Shiro enter ahead of him. It's sparse but warm, three rooms that Shiro can see off the main, with enough windows and skylights to make it feel like they're still outside.

“I like it out here. It's quiet.” Keith closes the door behind them and heads to the kitchen—what must be a kitchen, even though Shiro doesn't recognize half the appliances. “You hungry?”

He’s not, but Keith is offering to cook for him, so he nods. Shiro sits at the table while Keith sets water to boil.

The meal is the kind of homespun thing he used to make himself out of desperation as a latchkey kid. It’s like pasta and passively plain, but it's warm and he is hungry, after all.

They eat in the quiet while Shiro makes small talk about the house, breeze scattering the light coming in through the wide windows. It's a glorified outpost; Keith's the only one that uses it now. Shiro can stay as long as he wants, he says, and Keith will stay with him.

“If you want,” he adds.

Shiro takes a breath and tries to smile at him. He wants Keith to stay, but some small part of him can't get the image out of his head: Keith's face lit in violent purple, the blood on his face and the terror in his eyes mirroring the thrumming of Shiro's heart as he realized he had no control. He got it back, but only after blood. Only after it was too late.

When he comes back to himself, he's staring down at his fork and Keith is kneeling beside him, turning his head, fingers sliding through his hair. Touch. It's always touch with him. His eyes are bright and unreadable. This is Shiro's move to make. He reaches up and pulls Keith's hand down, holding it in both of his own. “Is there a shower?”

Keith nods and stands and pulls Shiro up after him. It's a small bathroom for two full grown men, but they make it work. There's a light tension in the air. Keith gets quiet and gives him space. When they're out, he sits next to Shiro on the bed, bare and beautiful. The mark Shiro left on his shoulder is all but gone. He can’t even pick it out. It's still light out, but his body can't decide if he's ready to sleep. The restless energy is still there like repurposed panic trying to find an outlet.

Keith watches him. His eyes are deep. He wants—Shiro can feel it in his gut—but he doesn't know how to ask. Shiro makes the first move, pulling him down gracelessly so they're lying next to each other on the small bed, letting the tension rise between them. “Do they know you left?”

Keith reaches across him and picks up his metal hand. Shiro tries not to flinch. “They’ll figure it out. There's a tracker on the ship, I’m pretty sure.” He spreads Shiro's fingers and then pulls the hand to his mouth, pressing a kiss to the back of it. Shiro’s body stills against his will, heart in his throat, but Keith doesn't back off. He rolls and then rises enough to throw a leg over Shiro's thighs. placing Shiro's hand on his hip in an unspoken instruction to hold still hovering over Shiro, bangs hanging in his eyes.

"I don't deserve you.”

“Yeah, you do,” Keith says.

Shiro throws his other hand over his eyes, not wanting praise or half-truths or comfort, but Keith pries it away. "You do," he says against the back of Shiro's hand. "Of course you do."

Honesty has never been Keith's weakness.

He lifts off Shiro and taps his hip. "Turn over."

Shyness isn't either. Shiro’s halfway through complying before he pauses to wonder why, his brain making several connections that have heat settling into his gut. Keith traces a hand down his spine, glancing over the scars there, and back up. “Can I try something?” he asks, voice low, and the words are familiar though it takes a second to remember why.

“Yeah,” Shiro says, another thrill shooting down his spine. Keith presses his lips between Shiro’s shoulder blades and pulls him up for a kiss, until he's kneeling on the bed with Keith plastered to his back. The angle is awkward but sweet. He smooths a hand down Shiro’s chest; the room was pleasantly warm before, but now it's almost over-hot.

“You brought—that?” The question falls out of him, but he can't say the word.

“Yes.” Keith says it like, _Of course_.

“Have you just—” the finger at his entrance starts moving in little circles before Keith presses inside, making Shiro's thoughts stutter. “Have you been carrying it around with you?“ he grits out.

Keith doesn't answer, smoothing a hand over his hip. “I wanted to be prepared.”

Given his prior experience, that's something Shiro can respect, but there are still more questions pounding through his mind, warring with the gentle fingers working at him. He's exacting and precise and—Shiro's never seen Keith pilot a ship he realizes. Not in earnest, not all out. He might be this determined and calculated and ambitious about it.

It's an odd thought but it makes him twitch.

Shiro finds his hips stuttering back involuntarily, needing more. Two fingers in and Keith adds a third, starting the slow way he did with the other two, a process that, if it's not meant to drive him up a wall, is doing a fair job of it anyway. He hears Keith reposition behind him, the sound sending a new wave of heat through him. “How'd you—” Keith pauses and moves his free hand under, cupping him and making his thoughts reorder again  “—How'd you get so good at this?”

“I practiced,” Keith says lightly.

The words take a second to process and another to hit home and then jealousy roars through Shiro like a thunder, building at speed.

“On _who_?”

Keith's breath hitches audibly at the low pitch of Shiro's voice. “On me.”

The image is the best come-down relief. He wonders how long it took, if he imagined it was Shiro’s hands on him or if he was waiting for this moment, imagining Shiro under him like this. He muffles his groan in the threadbare sheets, but before he can gather himself, Keith lines himself up and starts pressing in. Keith’s first time, Shiro thinks with something like terror, but Shiro trusts him with this. He’s painfully slow with it, painfully gentle.

His hips shake and slide back of their own accord and it's worth it just to hear Keith gasp, high and tight. “Fuck. Shiro—”

He wants to fall into this. It's a different kind of running but it's better because Keith is there and there's a way back from it they can pick apart together. He's already wet in Keith's hand. Keith drags his hand up and down in time with his first real thrust and it spikes through Shiro's gut in the best way.

Keith bends over him, wraps his arms around Shiro's chest and presses his face to the hollow between his shoulder blades, the heavy in-out drag on his hips against Shiro's unrelenting. No slow build up, no teasing; he’s everything all at once and Shiro lets it spin him up. The open windows cast a breeze across his face and it’s the first moment with the spiking numbness that means he’s about to go over that edge that he realizes he’s exactly where he wants to be and so is Keith—and maybe they’ve earned this.

Pleasure builds, and rises, and breaks over him slowly. Keith follows in the quiet with Shiro’s name on his lips, a whine against his shoulder where Shiro knows he’s going to have a mark.

He wishes distantly he were on his back or straddling Keith—anything to see his face.

Like he’s reading Shiro’s mind, Keith pulls out and turns him over carefully. It’s odd to be so visible. Nothing they’ve done has been done in the light, but this is perfect.  Keith is flushed and panting and beautiful and his hair is more in his face than usual. He never looks unkempt; just attractively messy. As soon as he’s though it, he realizes that’s something else Ulaz would laugh at him for.

“I think…” Keith tries to catch his breath, traces the scar on Shiro’s thigh and then the line of his muscle and an old mark on the side of Shiro's knee—not from the arena, but some childhood mishap. “I think you're mine. I think the first time I was with you, I knew—”

He slides his hands back down, shy, almost, like he's the one exposed.

But maybe he is. The light through the curtains casts him in sepia and Shiro doesn't know what it means to be looked at like that, but he's learning. He catches Keith's hand and pulls it to his mouth, palm up. He doesn’t realize he’s used the prosthetic until Keith’s hand turns in his and laces their fingers.

“I know,” Shiro says. And he does. The sun and fresh air and the play of light against Keith’s eyes is putting him back together piece by piece. “I know,” he repeats for himself and pulls Keith down on top of him, ignoring the mess for as long as he can.

Keith mumbles something indistinguishable against his throat and then turns his head and tries again. “We don’t have to stay here. We can go—anywhere.”

Something new rises in the back of his mind and the pit of his stomach, different from lust, different from panic. They have a ship and Shiro has Keith and those are the only two things he really needs. There’s a war to win, but it’ll be there waiting for them if they take their time. A hundred thousand planets and Keith will take him anywhere. Shiro squeezes his hand and breathes in the air of the room that smells like both of them and something cool blown in off the sand and realizes what the feeling is, finally.

It’s excitement.

“Yeah. We can.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> kolivan: oh god they've eloped
> 
> [[fic on tumblr](http://arahir.tumblr.com/post/174700187415/you-were-a-wild-thing-11k-2-of-2-angst-hc)] [[fic on twitter](https://twitter.com/arahir/status/1005167536499904512)]
> 
> Thank you so much for reading!! This AU has been an absolute joy to write and I hope you liked it, too!!


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